EMC
is following the trend of storage companies offering
one-stop shopping with its first reseller program.
The new EMC Select program includes the company’s
previously announced tape partnership with ADIC.
Other vendors in the program include host bus adapter vendors QLogicand Emulexand switch maker CNT. EMC says there will be more partnership announcements to
come.
Sean Kinney, manager of the new program, says EMC is reselling products it
was already recommending to users, only now the process will be easier.
“Customers have been asking for this for a while,” he told Enterprise
Storage Forum. “For EMC, this is a different business model, to be a
reseller.”
EMC also sells McData, Brocadeand
Ciscoswitches under its Connectrix program, but that is
more of an OEM relationship, Kinney says.
EMC is positioning the Select program as an information lifecycle management
(ILM) program, Kinney says. Offerings under the program “must be
complementary to our information lifecycle management strategy,” which calls
for data to be moved to different types of storage as its timeliness and
usefulness to an organization changes.
EMC says the tape libraries, HBAs and connectivity products are available in
configurations that have been EMC E-Lab Tested and qualified for
interoperability. Products in the EMC Select Program will be available for
sale by EMC’s direct sales force and partners.
The initial products available through the program include ADIC’s Scalar
family of automated tape libraries; QLogic SANblade and Emulex LightPulse
host bus adapters; and CNT’s FC/9000 FICON Director, UltraNet Edge Storage
Router 3000 and UltraNet Storage Director – eXtended (USD-X).
EMC will offer CNT’s FC/9000 Director product for FICON environments, the
UltraNet Edge Storage Router 3000 for EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility
(SRDF), and the UltraNet Storage Director – eXtended for SRDF extension of
ESCON over IP networks.
Under the program, EMC Select partners will directly deliver service and
support for their specific products. EMC’s Customer Service organization
will continue to provide problem diagnosis and isolation for the entire
infrastructure and will work in conjunction with all of the vendors through
mutual customer support agreements (CSAs) to ensure joint service
cooperation, escalation and rapid response.
“Purchasing all of the components from a single source and knowing that
they’ve been pre-tested and will work out of the box is reassuring and will
save time and headaches,” said Greg Schulz, senior analyst at the
Evaluator Group. “As the breadth of solutions from EMC continues to grow,
this vehicle for offering additional third-party products will help EMC be
an open end-to-end storage supplier and extend its position as a strategic
IT vendor that customers rely on.”